Hi Y'all!
I bought 3 pounds of whole leaf from the same
farmer as Mr. Premise. I purchased 1 pound
each of Burley, Turkish, and White Leaf. Total
cost: $49.00 US, includes shipping ($5.00)
We received a 2ftx2ftx4ft box marked: "Lawn
Ornaments" and I knew I did not order Pink
Flamingos so I wondered what the heck it was.
Opening the box turned out to be Tobacco.
Interesting.
There was therein, 3 large bags. 1 large-leafed
"Burley", one medium leafed "White Leaf" and
one small-leafed "Turkish".
One bag at a time, I followed the steps below:
1. Remove stems (except Turkish which are thin stems)
You press your thumb and curled index finger-hands
around the stem and with your other hand, grab the
end-stem and pull apart. You end up with a long
stem in one hand, and the other, the non-stemmed leaf.
2. A Cross-cut paper shredder that cuts strips of 1x1/4"
3. A Heavy duty Food processor with full-on/pulse chops
the strips all up. The blades are serrated. Not sure
if this works better than non-serrated blades.
This results in random mix of 1/8x1/8 to 1/2x1/4 in sq/rect
and it all depends on how well your food processor cuts and
how long you keep the chopping running before it starts to
smoke itself. ;)
The entire process took 4-5 hours and resulted with 4
10-1/2x10-1/2x2" zipped-locked bags, 2 bags of Burley,
one bag of Turkish, and one bag of White-Leaf
Unfortunately, I do not have a scale so I do not know if
I ended up with 1 pound or more of each tobacco variety.
As for smoking the products, Burley naturally has a bite,
but tolerable, and the same goes for White-Leaf, but for
Turkish - I almost doubled over. Turkish is something I
am going to have to go easy with and maybe I will have
to blend it into other tobacco varieties to soften the blow.
But overall, everything went well. Except...
There could be long term wear & tear on these machines
and my spouse was not happy with a tobacco smelling food
processor and paper shredder so I am going to have to find
another solution if I want to continue with the whole leaf operation,
and scissors cutting is out of the question for me as I do not
want to cut/smoke/cut/smoke - that would kill the fun out of it.
If there is a commercial tobacco shredder available, I'd buy it. Most
of these machines seems to be available from the Chinese, made for
commercial/industrial markets and it's hard to know what they can do,
what they cost, how big they are, what it looks like with the eyeball,
and "try it in 30 days or return it". These Chinese machines appear
on the website as Alibaba and it's sister sites.
I did find a US based vendor that sells a re-branded Chinese model for
$249.00, but again do not have a clear picture what it can do. And then
there is the rest - "coffee-grinder" models, meat-grinders, home made
and antiques - probably rusted and no longer functional.
It's been a fun enterprise really - and it's all about lessons as they
say, and I am grateful for it!
